Am I doing it wrong... (Road Toll Statistics)

[Grunter]

I decided to search up where the "statistics" come from to get a better understanding on the causes/reasons of fatal accidents.

Firstly went to the QLD Police website and looked at Statistical Review for the 2011-2012 year ( http://www.police.qld.gov.au/Resourc...ts/Traffic.pdf ). Shows some interesting numbers, but only shows number of fatalities (by region) and then the number of offenses (speed cameras (fixed and mobile), drink driving, red light cameras, etc). Didn’t really give much more information on the causes of fatalities.

So from this report I noticed it mentioning “Webcrash Data”. So went looking for that report and found the “Weekly Road Toll Report” (pdf - https://www.webcrash.transport.qld.g.../roadsense.pdf ). This has a much more detailed breakdown on road fatalities and the reasons assigned to the contributing causes. I won’t go into it all, however on part that stood out to me was the “Road Toll by Behaviours and Characteristics” (page 5). The methodology on these numbers do your head in.

Basically most crashes are given one or more causes of the fatality. These are the numbers that are quoted by media, government and police. They are given in numbers by factor/involving/age group/etc. Without going into it, I found these numbers to be interesting. So basically the 20% odd that is quoted being the cause of deaths related to speeding, is not accurate. The 20% can represent ONE of many causes of the fatality. Another cause for the same death could have been “Road and Roadside”, this quoted as being…

“The road and roadside characteristic is attributed to crashes where roadside features or road surface conditions may have contributed to the crash. This includes all crashes where unfavourable road conditions have contributed to a crash, or where the crash nature was hit fixed obstruction or temporary object.”

So getting more detail has shown that speeding is not just exceeding the posted speed limit, but also takes into account speed to the conditions, and not just weather, but objects on the road hit. i.e I could be driving in rain conditions at 70kph in a posted 80kph zone, lose control, hit a fence while not wearing my seatbelt and have a contributing factor in:

Involving Speeding Drivers
Involving Drivers – Wet Road
Road and Roadside
Involving Road Conditions
Unrestrained Vehicle Occupants

It gets even more muddy when you read more fine print…

“Contributing circumstances are circumstances that may have contributed to a unit being involved in a road traffic crash. A contributing circumstance may not necessarily have been the direct cause of a crash.
Any road crash has a complex combination of contributing and causal factors, so there can be any number of contributing circumstances recorded for a single crash. Contributing circumstances are attributed to units involved in the crash (rather than the crash itself), so a single crash may have more than one instance of the same contributing circumstance. In addition, more than one contributing circumstance can be attributed to any unit involved in the crash.
There may be more than one contributing factor for each fatality, therefore the percentages above may add up to more than 100%. “

So I get that technically the stats are right when read in context, but stating individual percentages as the specific problem (i.e speeding 20%) just doesn’t make sense (hopefully someone does get it).

2011/2012 QLD
Total fatalities - 270

Usual suspects quoted by Media/Government/Police Services as the reason for fatalities and speed cameras, RBT’s, etc.:

Reasons that contributed to fatalities were,
Speeding - 22.2%
Drink Drivers - 18.1%
Fatigued - 14.8%
Had no Seatbelt - 24.3%

Reasons not generally mentioned that contributed to fatalities were,
Road and Roadside - 36.7%
Involving drivers
- Illegal Manoeuvrer - 29.3%

Now look at the chart below and remember that this is what they use to quantify the reasons for speed reduction (amongst other items).



Forget what I’ve said though, and look at their statistics and make your own conclusions (or should that be “make up” like what’s being reported).

NB: This is NOT a shot at the police!! Just the way stats are reported.